With the first Origami devices out the door, Microsoft is setting its sights on the next generation of tiny tablet PCs - products known within the company as "Vistagami" devices. The new minitablets are likely to resemble the first of the ultramobile PCs, though they will run Windows Vista, rather than XP.

no, it is a troll post
the tpic is about a hardware device, and you have nothing better to do than to rant how vista failed to linux

and there is a big market for tablet-pcs, the only problem is the price of the curent generation
or are you willed to pay an extra 500$ just for a 12" touchpad? I'm not. and as long as tablets cost significantly more than regular laptops this won't change

The way I see it, there would be a market for them if they did the hardware right. They didn't. People are not interested in tablets as heavy as laptops with the same hardware as laptops with the same operating systems as laptops and with a 2-3 hour battery time.

A tablet is not supposed to be a laptop without a keyboard. It's supposed to be a large PDA.

Produce a tablet with a dead simple GUI, very light weight specialized OS and cheap low-power hardware. It doesn't matter if it's slow, because I don't think most people want to watch movies or play Doom 3 on those things. They want access to docs, good ways to write notes. It has to be instant on/off. It should hold battery power of a week at least. It should hold enough memory to contain many books.

You should be able to hold it horizontally by the edge with your hand without straining your wrist, like a plastic tray. It has to be very light.

They want to keep books, news, notes, drawings, sketches, comics, pictures on them. Imagine it keeping the equivalent of 10 kg 20 cm thick stack of schoolbooks right in your school bag, updated with the latest editions of the books.

Remember the old cliché of the paperless society? It didn't happen, because there was no actual replacement made to physically replace the paper. Laptops, small PDAs, phones and desktop PCs are a poor replacement for information that is best stored on paper, namely static information.

That could be solved with properly designed tablets. They should be designed to replace paper. They should handle similarly to paper and books.